Commentary on Australian and world events from a socialist and democratic viewpoint

User experience

As I mentioned a while ago, after years of having the blog managed for me by Jacques Chester (thanks again!) I’m now out on my own. I’m working through WordPress.com. A reader has mentioned that the process of commenting has become burdensome, something I’ve noticed with the default WordPress setup. I’ve tried to fix this by removing the requirement for an email address.

I’d appreciate it if readers could comment on what happens when they try to post a comment. If you can’t comment at all, please email me at j.quiggin@uq.edu.au

When I posted on he said/He said a login was required, but I simply used a password that I have used elsewhere and the post was allowed. I’m not sure whether any password would have been accepted as a first …

More generally, can I say that I find this interface less useful than the old one? While it was a nuisance to have to continually enter an email address to post (unless you left the page active on a device) navigation begween topics and finding older topics was far easier. It also had the look and feel of a more serious blog, whereas this looks very much more like the web equivalent of post it notes.

It’s striking that, even though they would appear to be rivals, each claiming to have a better version of blockchain, the cryptocurrencies rise and fall in lockstep. Their true value of zero will be attained eventually, but it may be some time yet.

Exchanges only offer BTC/USD (or BTC/JPY, BTC/EUR etc) ‘real world’ currency pairs. If you want to trade another crypto currency eg. Litecoin, you’re forced to do LTC/BTC pair trading. If the value of BTC/USD drops, and the value of LTC/BTC remains more or less the same, the value of LTC/USD has to drop as well. Bitcoin really is ‘the one ring that rules them all and binds them’. Which means they’re all just as much of a scam as Bitcoin…

I liked the web 1.0 look of the old website, but new wordpress site seems to be working fine. I run a small wordpress site and I do see a lot of new users from .ru opening accounts for no particular reason.

Tacking away from my June 6 comment, I think the headline font (Playfair Display) is discouragingly old-fashioned for a progressively themed blog. Its’ typographically condensed look slows scanning comprehension from post to post, with the limitation best illustrated by the relative illegibilty of the all caps sub title (COMMENTARY ON … etc), remembering also that long upper-cap strings are considered to slow readabilty in general.

Playfair Display appears to have been designed more for larger text, and squeezing a lot of letters onto a book cover or cigarette packet. It doesn’t render well at small sizes, and looks very blurry on my screen. I’d possibly try swapping everything ‘Playfair Display’ to ‘Open Sans’ and see if you think it’s an improvement.